openSUSE Stable Maintenance Process Now Fully Open

A while ago, we wrote about the work on moving maintenance support into the Open Build Service. Since then announcement, some of the internal maintenance scripts have been running in parallel to the Open Build Service but the Security, Maintenance and OBS teams are now convinced things are ready for a switch. Soon, to be exact Thursday, March 15 2012, your updates will be delivered exclusively by OBS via an open workflow!

Consequences

For users, nothing changes. The patch naming will change a a bit but zypper & YaST takes care of that automatically. The real changes are for the openSUSE packagers. In short:

OBS and Bugzilla are now THE tools to coordinate openSUSE updates

That means you can do submit requests for updates to openSUSE via :Update directly!

You will have to update to osc 0.134 for all this to work properly. It has the ability to do maintenance submit requests.

I would like to see delta rpm pushed on repositories like KDE48 and the like. It is really a waste thing to download the whole huge oxygen-icon-theme* or kdeartwork4* when we know that the changes are really small.